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In the Cilento region of southern Italy, on the coast of the Tyrrhenian Sea, Edoardo Tresoldi created Incipit from rolls of wire mesh for the 19th annual Meeting del Mare music festival last June. The artist enlisted the help of young men from the community to construct the 440-pound, 18-foot-tall permanent installation. “They learned a lot of things, like in a Renaissance bottega dell’arte”—a workshop— says Antonio Oriente, who, with Simone Pallotta, curated the public art for last year’s gathering.

At the top of the columnar structure (the name means “it begins” in Latin), a flock of intricately hand-sculpted seagulls passes through and then emerges from the arches, the birds’ action seemingly suspended in time. Aiming to explore “the dialogue that exists between a figure and the space around it,” says Tresoldi, the transparency of the wire mesh allowed him to “create drawings in the landscape.”